Questions and Answers
by Marissa Elizabeth
Summary: Natasha and Bruce discover each other.


Natasha Romanoff was not a scared woman. She had been scared before, yes, as a girl. There are only a few ways to become a person such as Natasha, and the most common is fear. But no one, not a single person in her adult life, had scared her. The possibility of what Loki could do scared her. The possibility of losing Clint scared her. But not a single person, by their presence alone, frightened her.

Except for Bruce Banner, of course, the man who was always angry. He intrigued her. So after New York, when they weren't fighting a god every few minutes, she got to know him. How much he hated himself, how badly he wanted to help everyone around him, how him being so inquisitive and being so kind was his penance for the other guy's sins, she learned it all. She came to the conclusion that anyone who sat down and bothered to learn a damn thing about Bruce Banner couldn't help falling in love with him. She ignored it, at first. She stopped herself from blushing when he shot her his trademark crooked smiles; she punched Clint when he asked her what was going on between the two of them. But the lady did protest too much, and Bruce noticed.

So, logically, he took to learning everything he could about Natasha Romanoff. He learned how she earned the name Black Widow, what she had to do to earn any respect as a spy, and he learned the little things. He learned the name of the town she was born in, and the fact that if she were ever to get a tattoo, it would be a butterfly, not the vicious spider that happened to be her namesake. Bruce had always thirsted for knowledge, but now he thirsted for her. He wanted to know her; he wanted to know everything about her. Tony Stark brushed it off as another project of Bruce's, but this one, he never seemed to drop. The questions built up for months, until Natasha and Bruce both knew that they would never be able to break their relationship (be it friendship or otherwise) simply because the other knew too much.

Natasha let Bruce see the inside of her broken head; she gave him a guided tour of the shattered woman she used to be. Bruce told her all the ways he had tried destroying himself, one more gruesome and more inhumane than the next. She memorized his hidden scars. But every night they spent together, one always left. For months the awkward "I guess I'll see you tomorrow then…" conversations were allowed to go on. Until one night, Natasha lost just a tiny bit of her precious, ever-present control.

"You know, you can stay, if you want…" for the first time in years, she was blushing. Bruce couldn't help noticing, couldn't help noting it, and couldn't help mirroring her. Nearly stuttering, he agreed. This night, there were finally no more questions. They just lay there, and they tried to wake themselves up from the dream they knew they must be having. Just before they fell asleep, she noticed Bruce take a slip of paper from his pocket.

"What are you doing?" she asked, groggy. He showed her the piece of paper he kept on his person at all times, and painstakingly rewrote from memory every time it was destroyed. Ashamed of himself, he told her. He answered the one question no one else had ever had the opportunity to ask. This slip of paper bore all of the names of all of the people whose deaths he caused. He knew them all, knew their stories, and remembered their funerals in stark detail. He read the list every night before he slept.

Natasha was floored, to say the least. She had known many murderers, had even slept with plenty. Hell, she was one herself. But she did not know of a single murderer who knew exactly who they had ended, including herself. It was then that she realized that Bruce Banner was not a murderer. He had killed, of course, but he had never murdered. It was then that she realized that he was the kindest man she had ever known. And when she kissed him for the first time, she smiled genuinely for the first time since New York.

That night was the first night since his accident that Bruce did not cry himself to sleep.


End file.
